John Wilcock
British-born fixture of New York counter-culture and Warhol acolyte who co-founded Village Voice
JOHN WILCOCK, who has died aged 91, was a British tabloid journalist who became a figure in 1960s American counter-culture as co-founder of the Village Voice, an acolyte and chronicler of Andy Warhol, with whom he co-founded Interview magazine, the author of travel guides with titles such as Mexico on $5 a Day, and an editor of or contributor to countless alternative and underground newspapers.
In a 1973 profile, The New York Times described Wilcock as “an influential man nobody knows”, and his enigmatic quality led one profile writer to label him “the Zelig of Sixties counter-culture publishing” – a reference to the Woody Allen character who, out of his desire to be liked, takes on the characteristics of personalities around him.
John Wilcock was born in Sheffield on August 4 1927. After leaving school aged 16, he became a cub reporter on the Sheffield Telegraph then moved to London, where he worked for the Daily Mail and the Mirror.
In the early 1950s he departed for Canada where he worked for a wire service, wrote for the magazines Saturday Night and Liberty, and developed a line in “stunt journalism” – such as an account of a night spent in a supposedly haunted lighthouse in Toronto harbour.
He soon moved to New York, renting a cheap apartment in Greenwich Village, but was disappointed to find there was no local paper to tell him “where all the action was and parties were”. Without knowing a soul he put up a handwritten note in the local bookshop asking if anybody was interested in helping him start a paper. There is, though, some dispute as to whether he could be described as one of the founders of Village Voice.
The “Voice” was born in October 1955 in a dingy two-room apartment in Greenwich Avenue. Its founding group included a sometime psychologist, Ed Fancher, who put up $10,000 as initial funding, the novelist Norman Mailer, who dreamt up the title, and Dan Wolf, a peripatetic Greenwich Village intellectual who became its first editor.
Wolf and Fancher had run into Wilcock in a bar and, partly on the strength of his work as a British tabloid journalist, he became the paper’s first news editor and author of a weekly column, “The Village Square,” a mixture of local news and trivia.
“When we started,” Wilcock recalled, “everyone thought we were totally nuts. It was automatically assumed that because I wrote about folk singers in the first issue that it must be a communist paper. It wasn’t, it was just the first liberal paper after – or during – the Mccarthy years. It sold for a nickel and nobody bought it.” To make ends meet Wilcock found a job as an offbeat contributor to The New York Times’s travel section.
By the early 1960s people were buying Village Voice and the paper developed a readership far beyond Greenwich Village itself. When the underground press exploded in the mid-1960s, the Voice was the only model available, although it was denounced for woolly liberalism by its more radical brothers and sisters. These were to include Wilcock, who in 1965 decamped to the first of the
Voice’s local challengers, the Leftist
East Village Other (EVO).
The move, he claimed, had not involved any initiative on his part: “What happened was that I met this enticing lady, Sherry Needham, wooed her a few times, and made her promise to star in ‘The Singing Tit-o-gram’ for my [“Village Square”] column when I got back from a trip to Japan. On my return, I found she’d shacked up with Walter Bowart [the publisher of EVO]
but she agreed to do the photo thing as long as Walter came along. After our stoned trio had pulled this off, Walter asked me if I’d write for his new paper and I agreed.”
Wilcock’s Village Voice colleagues, who had always regarded him as something of a thorn in the side, ordered him to stop writing for EVO or resign: “I said I’d leave. I was aggrieved because Ed [Fancher] had recently banned me from receiving mail at the office in case I was getting marijuana … As soon as Walter heard this he invited me to edit EVO and changed the masthead to read: ‘Edited by William Randolph Hearst and John Wilcock’.”
The Other, as it became known, wrote about sex, drugs, music and the misadventures of counter-culture icons like Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg. One of the first newspapers to be financed largely by sex advertisements, it was a pioneer of unconventional layout, with large pictures and psychedelic typefaces.
By 1969 the paper had a circulation of 60,000, but as other alternative newspapers began to compete for ads, and the Village Voice began covering the counter-culture more, decline set in. By the time the venture folded in 1972, however, Wilcock had moved on.
One of his most important contributions to the alternative press was the founding, in 1966, of the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS), initially under the aegis of EVO, which provided small underground publications with access to inexpensive shared content – text and images, news and views.
Wilcock also developed a subscription service which offered all UPS papers to mainstream media outlets. After a short time, the staff at
EVO being too busy, he took UPS over
with Tom Forcade, a cannabis rights activist who had produced his own underground paper with a bullet hole through the centre. (In 1978 he would kill himself with the same gun.)
UPS thus became an important channel through which countercultural news stories, criticism and cartoons were widely disseminated. Though, by the mid 1970s, most underground newspapers in the US had ceased publication, their influence continued to be felt.
While working for EVO, Wilcock was goaded into attending the screening of an Andy Warhol film and was so intrigued by the audience that he soon became a regular frequenter of the artist’s “Factory” in Manhattan.
In 1969 he and Warhol co-founded Interview magazine, which featured usually unedited interviews with pop and counter-culture figures. In 1971 Wilcock published The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol, a misnomer because the book mainly consisted of a random hotchpotch of interviews with Warhol friends and hangers-on.
As a sideline during the 1960s Wilcock also worked for the travel book publisher, Arthur Frommer, churning out guidebooks on how to live on $5 a day in Mexico, Greece, Japan, India and elsewhere. He published Other Scenes, an underground magazine featuring travel advice, poetry and social commentary; and he wrote or contributed to books on occult matters, including, in 1976, A Guide to Occult Britain.
During his travels abroad, Wilcock typed up a list of friends willing to host each other while travelling. From this he developed a printed directory (later a website) called Hospitality Exchange (www.hospex.net), a network of people from all over the world willing to offer varying degrees of hospitality to travellers. He also contributed practical advice for travellers to the London-based Insight Guides.
In the 1980s and 1990s Wilcock published several small newspapers, including John Wilcock’s Secret Diary. In later life he moved to Ojai, California, where he published an online (and occasionally printed) magazine called The Ojai Orange.
In 2010 he released an autobiography, Manhattan Memories, and in 2016 Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall published John Wilcock: New York Years, 1954-1971, the first instalment of a two-volume biography in graphic-novel form.
In 1967 Wilcock married Amber Lamann, but they divorced in 1972.
Wilcock claimed to have been a smoker of marijuana for almost half a century. Despite (or perhaps because of) this, he outlived most of his counter-culture peers by several decades.
John Wilcock, born August 4 1927, died September 13 2018